‘Avatar: Frontiers Of Pandora’ review: a stunning world let down by lacklustre action

Leaping from the back of your dragon-like ikran, you plummet through the skies, only to have your fall broken by the soft canopy of the rainforest below. As you land, night falls – but rather than being plunged into darkness, open-world action Avatar: Frontiers Of Pandora flares into colour, with alien foliage shining in luminous greens and stunning blues. The distant planet of Pandora has never looked so breathtaking.

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But what follows is the crackling sound of a cheap radio – a kooky member of the resistance faction you’ve aligned with is using their expensive military equipment to tell you a groan-worthy knock-knock joke. You’re wrenched from your surroundings and plopped firmly back into your computer chair, wondering why a game so focused on immersing you in the world of Pandora and the lives of its blue-skinned Na’vi natives would interrupt your experience for something so… lame. Nothing sums up Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora better.

You play as a young Na’vi who has escaped captivity from the Resource Development Administration (RDA), an army of humans responsible for violently colonising Pandora. Your character’s first taste of freedom is intoxicating: dashing through the planet’s forests, jumping into trees and flinging yourself from their branches never really gets old. But the unbridled joy of running through its dense rainforests, striking flatlands and murky swamps serves as a constant reminder of Frontiers Of Pandora’s other failings.

Avatar: Frontiers Of Pandora. Credit: Massive Entertainment, Ubisoft.

Though the first Avatar film is one of the highest-grossing movies of all time, the game’s dull and generic plot doesn’t live up to filmmaker James Cameron‘s tale. Developer Massive Entertainment‘s story of resistance is delivered by non-player characters (NPCs) that are at their best palatable and their worst grating and annoying caricatures. The NPCs milling around populated areas are even worse, and make Skyrim‘s monotone guards sound like poets by spouting the same two or three lines of dialogue on repeat.

Tasked with convincing more Na’vi tribes to join the fight against human colonisers, you set off armed with a mixture of alien and human weaponry, ready to dismantle the invaders’ pollution-spewing outposts. The process of taking these bases out is formulaic, and will feel very familiar to fans of publisher Ubisoft‘s open-world Far Cry series. And while it is certainly satisfying to land a well-placed arrow on the weak point of a hulking AMP mech suit, blowing its driver to smithereens, overall gunplay feels lacklustre, with bullets that bizarrely feel nowhere near as impactful as arrows.

Levelling up provides more equipment to use, but it first needs to be crafted. Luckily, hunting down materials is one of the more engaging parts of the game, and it’s fun to work out which direction to delicately pull the mouse or tease the joystick to best harvest moss, bark or mushrooms. Pandora is teeming with exotic plantlife, almost all of which can be scanned through your Na’vi vision, which handily highlights harvestable materials, neabry animals, and opponents’ weak spots.

Avatar: Frontiers Of Pandora. Credit: Massive Entertainment, Ubisoft.

This vision is essentially identical to the Eagle Vision in Ubisoft’s Assassin Creed series, or The Witcher 3’s Witcher Senses. Like so many mechanics in Frontiers Of Pandora, it feels copy-pasted without any real innovation – a trope-y hacking minigame even makes an appearance. Your young naive Na’vi is somehow a natural at using a highly technical piece of kit to access complex military-grade machinery, and it feels tacked on – as if players would be lost without the ability to redirect pipes under the floor.

Yet when Frontiers Of Pandora gets it right, the game really does feel special. Scaling Pandora’s iconic floating islands to bond with an ikran is phenomenal, and flying it through the skies afterward is a fantastic payoff. Yet like everything in this game, that euphoria doesn’t last long, as you soon realise you’ve been torn away from the world below.

There’s a reason that Sony‘s open-world Horizon series doesn’t provide you with flying mounts until the last act of the second game. It trivialises travel and makes the world less special. Frontiers Of Pandora gets around this in later regions by barring your mount from ‘unfamiliar skies’ until you unlock flight again, but giving a player an ability and then taking it away feels like a cheap way of adding artificial pacing.

Ultimately, if you’re a fan of this particular brand of open-world formula, you’ll likely get dozens of hours of enjoyment from Avatar: Frontiers Of Pandora. It’s worth checking out for the gorgeous imagining of Pandora alone. But unless you’re a diehard fan of the franchise, don’t expect to find any new ground that’s not been trodden a dozen times before, by bigger and better games.

Avatar: Frontiers Of Pandora is available on PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC. We played on PC.

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